- The Nashulai Maasai Conservancy in Kenya is entirely owned and managed by Maasai people and covers 2,400 hectares of land to protect biodiversity and secure land rights.
- Maasai herders lease their private lands to the conservancy, and in return, they cannot sell the land to anyone other than another member of the conservancy for conservation purposes, nor can they put up fences.
- The conservancy’s land strategy arose after outsiders purchased land in the county, fencing it off and blocking open grazing areas for wildlife and livestock to roam.
- Conservationists say the conservancy’s model has seen success but caution that it will continue working if Maasai landowners feel like they will continue receiving benefits from the land strategy and are included in decision-making.
“Look, giraffes are walking in front of me. We have hundreds of them in our conservancy. There are zebras, too, see! And elephants,” Nelson Ole Reiyia describes during a phone interview with Mongabay, which quickly turned into a video call.
Ole Reiyia is the co-founder of the Nashulai Maasai Conservancy, established in 2016 on the edges of the famous Maasai Mara National Reserve in southern Kenya’s Narok county, near the border with Tanzania. In eastern Africa’s sea of state- and NGO-managed protected areas, this conservancy stands out for its management by the Indigenous Maasai people — and its conservation approach. The conservancy, covering more than 2,400 hectares (5,930 acres), is made up of individual private land plots owned by Maasai who came together to protect the environment and their rights.
While in some places in Kenya, Maasai land privatization has led to the fragmentation of grazing land and conservation impacts, Ole Reiyia says in Nashulai there’s already been visible and positive results. Instead of keeping the land divided, landowners glued their lands together.
“Nashulai was a big dust bowl. There was no grass on the land,” Ole Reiyia tells Mongabay. “After two years, the grass cover improved. Our women restored the river. They removed tons of garbage, and then, together with the youth, replanted indigenous seedlings along the riverbanks. Over time, nature responded. Wildlife came back. This is a corridor that links the conservancies with the [Maasai Mara].”
Zebras, wildebeests, giraffes: these are animals Ole Reiyia grew up with. But more than a decade ago, they became increasingly rare, he said. This was not only due to the degradation of grasslands, but also to electric fences that fragmented vast open land where wildlife roamed. He said he witnessed some zebras and giraffes being strangled by them.
The fences also impacted Maasai herders. According to Ole Reiyia, fences first appeared when outsiders bought land titles in Narok county and decided to use them to protect their property. But as the Maasai are traditionally a warrior pastoralist people, moving their cattle and sheep according to grazing cycles, they, too, require vast open lands. The fences, along with Kenya’s growing agricultural demands, national parks, protected areas and private ownership efforts, shrank grazing territories.
But with Nashulai’s conservancy system, “one gets to graze openly in an open grazing system,” says Joyce Mbataru, communications manager at the Kenyan Wildlife Conservancies Association (KWCA). KWCA is an association that oversees most conservancies in Kenya. Nashulai is one of its members.
“If you come together as different landowners, then you will be able to continue grazing openly, allowing wildlife to move closely together. So, it benefits both the wildlife and the livestock.”
It is also a form of protection, says Kathleen Klaus, assistant professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, who specializes in land rights, climate change and forced migration in Kenya.
“Building a conservancy creates a bigger grazing space, preventing further encroachment and ensuring that international or national entities won’t try to buy up their land.”
Bringing lands together
Shortly after Kenya’s independence from Great Britain, the Maasai obtained a first layer of protection: the Land (Group Representatives) Act. The concept involved setting aside a piece of land that was recorded and registered as a “Ranch” and was legally owned by a group of people. The system offered the Maasai the security of land tenure and protected their land from loss to other tribes.
The ranches are administered by Maasai family heads, the elders, gathered in community groups — all male. Later revisions included women and ethnic minorities in decision-making and ownership. Still, protections proved insufficient; therefore, many in the area decided to move to private ownership.
“Twenty years ago, it was community land. But they moved to private ownership because they were afraid that the committee members, because they were so powerful, might allocate a lot of land for themselves — which happened,” Ole Reiyia describes. “Most committee members had the largest land, usually.”
Once the land was divided, privately, each owner was free to do as they wished with it.
However, due to its proximity to Maasai Mara National Park, the land became attractive to property developers, and many Maasai received offers to sell their land. Faced with the sums offered, the Maasai, who suffer from food insecurity, quickly gave in.
“Poor people were taken advantage of by richer people who wanted to buy land very cheaply without consideration of the fact that this land is more than a piece of real estate. They give them a little bit of money and they build tourist camps, farms, regardless of the fact that this land is actually critical for the preservation of the biodiversity that exists in Masai Mara and Serengeti,” Ole Reiyia describes, looking at the whole situation as land-grabbing. “The Mara Serengeti is a multibillion-dollar industry. Yet the local people continue to live in poverty.”
In the country, this privatization of land, once communal or held under group ranches, has led to instances where it failed to deliver on its economic promises, led to social disparities, and adversely affected forests, grasslands, and wildlife that were once managed collectively, according to studies.
This prompted Reiyia and others to create the Nashulai Maasai Conservancy. “Nashulai” means “a place of balance and harmony where coexistence is the main ethos” in the Maa language.
Here, land privatization is a little different. Sixty-four landowners have signed a contract with the conservancy, leasing their land for a renewable 10-year term in exchange for payment. In return, during this period, the landowner cannot sell the land to anyone other than another member of the conservancy for conservation purposes, nor can they put up fences.
“Wildlife is part of our history, part of our identity,” says Ole Reiyia, whose clan is represented by the hyena and had traditions around the species. In the past, hyenas would eat clan members who had passed away, and the community believed they would live on in the animal.
Instead of forming community land trusts or using the Kenyan Land Act, members organized themselves as an association of private landowners.
“I used to see that when I was a kid, when the land was intact, not subdivided, there was wildlife there. The Maasai community is a social tribe; they can’t live in isolation from each other and from nature,” Ole Reiyia explains.
According to a paper on Maasai land privatization published in Frontiers, different approaches to land privatization affect resource management and conservation outcomes. In the Oloirien group ranch in the Maasai Mara, private land tenure led to more enclosures and weakened collective management, but another ranch had different results.
“Olgulului/Ololarashi, which integrated demands for private property rights with communal access and management of the commons, was able to mitigate many unintended consequences of privatisation, such as path dependency and resource fragmentation,” writes Gabriella Santini, research assistant at University College London’s department of anthropology and author of the paper.
Still, the KWCA, while recognizing the successes of the Nashulai conservancy’s model, insists on caution. For example, a private landowner could one day want to buy someone’s land for a higher price than the conservancy is able to pay. What stops the landowner from selling it?
“The challenge with that is to have a benefit-sharing structure that works for everyone so that everyone feels they have benefited, getting them to do public participation to ensure that everybody has been included in the decision-making process,” Mbataru says. “Just like in other conservancies, governance is usually a challenge.”
According to the conservancy, Nashulaï is home to approximately 500 zebras (Equus quagga), 200 wildebeests (Connochaetes taurinus), thousands of warthogs (Phacochoerus africanus) and the largest Masai giraffe (Giraffa tippelskirchi) population in the eastern part of the Mara ecosystem. While researchers have not completed independent reports on wildlife populations in the conservancy, satellite data collected by Mongabay show an increase in vegetation density in Nashulai between 2016, the year of its establishment, and 2025.
In 2020, Nashulai Maasai Conservancy won the Equator Prize, a recognition by the United Nations Development Programme that awards community efforts to reduce poverty through conservation.
Looking to the future
In Narok county, agriculture is one of the main sources of livelihood, engaging more than 46% of the population. But due to climate change, rainfall seasons have become more unpredictable over the last 20 years, negatively affecting crops. In 2021, the county had an absolute poverty rate of 34% and 12% of the population experienced food insecurity — a situation that the conservancy is trying to address through to the tourism industry.
The conservancy employs community members as game rangers to supplement their income. It has also set up an educational and training center to prepare for tourism jobs in hospitality, photography and cultural mediation.
“There are many, many camps and lodges inside the parks. But most of them do not employ local people; they say that the local people don’t have the requisite skills to get jobs. If you enter the Mara, the gate, you’ll find so many women desperately trying to sell jewelry and trinkets by pushing them through the windows of safari cars, because they don’t have income. So, we are trying to change that,” Ole Reiyia says.
However, despite improved financial conditions for the population, the co-founder admits to having difficulties attracting funding.
“Our conservation model is not attractive for the big donor funding because we are small, we are community-run. Our concept is strange,” he says. “How can you have communities living side by side with wildlife? The tourists don’t want to see cows, they don’t want to see Maasai, they want to see touristic villages, they want to see the big five, they want to experience the golden age of the African safari, which used to exist in the 1900s, you know: lands without people.”
Banner image: Maasai people in the Nashulai Maasai Conservancy. Image © Marianne Nord, courtesy of Nashulai Maasai Conservancy.
Can cattle and wildlife co-exist in the Maasai Mara? A controversial study says yes
Citations:
Warrier, R., Boone, R., Keys, P., & Galvin, K. (2024). Exploring linkages between protected-area access and Kenyan pastoralist food security using a new agent-based model. Ecology and Society, 29(1). https://doi.org/10.5751/es-14455-290118
Santini, G. (2025). The Community Land Act and the subdivision of Kenya’s Maasailand’s remaining commons: implications for community conservation. Pastoralism Research Policy and Practice, 15. https://doi.org/10.3389/past.2025.14918
Feedback: Use this form to send a message to the author of this post. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.
Credits
